Beijing Adult Entertainment: What’s going on with Guo Degang, now China’s most reviled comedian?
The official version is that a BTV investigation into whether Guo’s Beijing villa encroached onto “public green space” turned nasty when a reporter was allegedly beaten up by Li Hebiao, a protégé of Guo’s. The comedian himself then turned up the heat with an incendiary attack on the media during a show, calling hacks “whore-respondents” and “green-light” prostitutes. As the public spat intensified, events began to turn against Guo.
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In fact, it was more of an ugly and undignified witch-hunt: the cancellation of performances at Guo’s theatres, for example, was not a voluntary reaction to public pressure but rather a state-backed crackdown on Guo himself. The fact that Guo – whose earthy, populist reinvigoration of cross-talk culture has previously copped accusations of lewdness – ended up being caught up in the Hu Jintao-backed “Sān sú ‘Three Vulgarities’ campaign’ (which he had himself satirized) only increased public distaste when People’s Daily tried to depict this as an example of press freedom in China. Now his books h …
See the full article from “Shanghaiist”